In Memory

Frederick Stepniak

Frederick Stepniak



 
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03/02/18 12:03 AM #1    

Laurie Longeway (Reinertsen)

I hadn’t  seen Fred since high school but went from Kindergarten to Senior with him, sitting next to him in 5th grade. Oddly, even remembering back to being 10, Fred and I had a fun time together. We walked home together many times. I am saddened to see this.


03/12/18 01:36 PM #2    

Paul Clabo

Eulogy for Frederic M. Stepniak

Delivered by Paul Clabo at Washburn-McReavy Funeral Chapel, Edina, Minnesota, on December 22, 2006

 

         Greetings.  This is a memorial, but today I’m wearing my red tie in honor of Fred and in honor of his Dad, Marion Stepniak.  Fred once told me, however conservative your gray or navy suit, a red tie will enliven your whole appearance.  I never buy or wear a red tie without remembering this classic piece of men’s fashion advice that Fred took from his father.

         We all just called him “Fred.”  Once I addressed a letter to him by his full first name.  I quickly learned that he was proud of the name his parents gave him, and that ‘Frederic’ was spelled without a final ‘k’.

         I must ask you to forgive an excursion into the past, especially our college years, the years I knew Fred best.  If personality is stamped upon us from birth, then those years may represent as well as any the man we have lost.

         I first came to know Fred in the summer of 1967, following our junior year at Minneapolis Southwest High School.  We worked together at the Lake Harriet Refectory that summer and the next.  Until then, there was little chance I might have supposed he could become my best friend or someone I would admire so enormously.  I recognized him from school but we probably never shared more than one class.

         That summer I discovered some of the things that made Fred so intriguing.  He was incredibly hard-working and adept – he became master of the three big gas-fired popcorn makers and he could hold and fill six boxes of popcorn at one time – but he had an anti-authoritarian attitude and a wicked sense of humor.  He traded barbs, insults actually, with Bill, one of our co-workers.  Believe it or not, Fred was very overweight in High School.  I can never forget how Fred dissolved into laughter when he repeated Bill’s best insult:  “You weren’t born, Fred.  You were just blobbed.”

         I didn’t see much of Fred during our senior year, but one of my favorite pictures of Fred appeared in our high school yearbook.  We had real winters then, and one of the activities in the annual Snow Days celebration at Southwest was a broomball competition.  The photograph shows Fred and the gang of guys that he organized into a broom hockey team, all of them wearing smiles of victory after defeating the members of the Southwest Hockey Team.  Our classmates will remember that, in those years, Southwest was a perennial contender for state hockey champion.  The coach, Dave Peterson, was revered and he was later chosen to coach the U.S. Olympic Team.  Fred learned hockey from his Swedish grandfather and he was an excellent player.  He was rejected when he asked to be on the Southwest team, probably because of his weight.  This was a sweet victory.

         Fred loved hockey.  As an adult he played in the amateur hockey leagues.  Once I went to see him play, and it was impressive.  Another time Fred took me to a North Stars game so I could see hockey well-played.  I stood and booed when the players dropped their gloves to fight, and Fred explained that this was the nature of hockey: in a precise and high speed game of physical skill it is next to impossible to keep your temper when others are slamming into you, in violation of the rules and at a cost to your physical safety.  But he loved the more sportsmanlike international game better, and the team he admired most was the Russians, who won by skill and not brutality.  Through Fred I could see the poetry of well-played hockey. 

         As a kid I never learned to skate properly, and Fred directed me to buy a decent pair of hockey skates.  He took me out to the rink on Lake of the Isles and patiently taught me the techniques of skating, of turning and stopping, even skating backwards.  I owe that to Fred.  Skating is a unique and wonderful pleasure, one of the holy mysteries of the north.  I still can see Fred skating, in that beautiful bowl, surrounded by islands and hills of trees, punctuated here and there by the spruces, the steeples of the churches, and the roofs of the fine homes.  I still can see him skating after his lessons had tired me out, accelerating across the ice and turning and skating in reverse with greater speed and facility than I have ever mustered going forward.

         We became more audacious in our second year at the Lake Harriet Refectory.  We invented mean-spirited initiations for the new workers, which I regret.  We enjoyed the fresh air and turns on the lake, in the emergency boat, helping sailors whose boats had tipped.  We invented a handball game to play off the back wall of the refectory at night with a tennis ball that we retrieved from the lake.  A ball named “Kathy.”  We set up a touch football game against our rivals, the Lake Calhoun Boats Boys.  We were the Reftiles, and we all wore t-shirts bearing the nicknames that Fred bestowed on us.  The trophy was a toy paddle that we found in the attic of the building at Lake Harriet.  After we won, we proudly took our trophy back to Lake Harriet and hung it over the manager’s desk.

         That fall we went off to college at the University of Minnesota.  Those were heady years, the years of discovering our adult capacities and responsibilities.  From 1968 to 1972, the years that Fred and I attended the University of Minnesota, our generation was in near-rebellion against the follies of our parents’ generation.  We supported a renewed dedication to universal civil rights, and we were incredulous that our political leaders would not retreat from an ill-advised war.  We knew that we, ourselves, might be called upon to pay with our lives for their mistake.  So we were willing to break the mould, to borrow freely from the other cultures of the world, including their styles of dress and thought and belief.  We did not assume that the American way was best.  There were so many of us that we could not be controlled, and eventually the whole American culture shifted.

         In that context, by the time we were sophomores, all the young men at college wore long hair.  Anyone who didn’t, you knew he was an engineering student, maybe a law student, or else a member of the Young Republicans.  Fred had gone to work as a stock boy at Dayton’s Southdale store.  It seemed several months went by before I saw Fred again, and, in the meantime, he had transformed himself.  I supposed it was the calling of young women.  He had shed all his extra weight and he became a handsome, athletic man, tall and well-favored.  Interesting, beautiful women were attracted to him, not only, I suppose, because of his brooding good lucks, his expressive eyebrows, his smooth baritone voice, but, I think, because he was an honest and sensitive man.

         At his suggestion, I followed Fred to Dayton’s.  There were three of us stock boys, all students at the University, who might have been mistaken for each other from behind, because of our flowing manes, still blonde then:  Fred, Craig Peterson, or “Bucko” as Fred called him, and I.  Much of our job involved delivering stock to the various departments.  It seemed impossible to keep up with Fred.  He had been able to memorize all the numbers that told which department should receive the merchandise, he knew everyone who worked in the store, he knew every back passageway and hiding place, he could stack pallets far above his head, and he handled every piece of equipment with aplomb.

         We became fast friends.  We often rode to school together.  He showed me how to play pool.  I probably never learned to organize a social life because Fred did that so well.  Fred was a great teller of stories and jokes, and he took me into his confidence.  In that spirit, there are probably things Fred told me that I will never reveal, applying the same measure of discretion that Fred always showed.  Young men need peers, I think, with whom to discuss the mysteries of women.  I will just say that I believe he was always a gallant and respectful man.  I considered him my best friend then, and, I suspect, I was not alone in believing that.  In later life he told me, his bachelorhood, his relative isolation, made him a target for male confidences.

         No friend could be more loyal, more steadfast, than Fred.  He continued to stay in close contact until around the time I was married.  I moved to Boston after college, expecting to start law school in the fall.  Fred had been exempted from the draft.  He explained that a physician had diagnosed him as having a nervous colon.  In those years, many young men got letters from doctors with dubious findings, but I don’t doubt that Fred’s diagnosis was real.  In any case, I think his resistance to authority might have made it hard in the Army.  While I was in Boston, later, when I was drafted, and even when I was in law school in New York, he kept up a correspondence that mitigated his absence.

         Fred was teaching tennis on behalf of the Minneapolis Park Board, and, when I was home in Minneapolis, he agreed to teach me to play.  He could win every point, and the only thing that let me keep up was being a runner.

         Fred also taught me some of the finer points of bicycle maintenance.  He had mechanical skills that I think he gathered from his father.  Another time he showed me how to change the oil in a car and he explained the axiom that an oil change is free.  He took me bicycling on the Grand Round of the Minneapolis Park System, a 40-mile trip.  He was such a great cyclist, even on that old Raleigh 10-speed he kept so many years, that it was hard for me to stay anywhere near him.  Once more he had to slow his pace for me.

         A few times I saw his apartment, at 34th and Third Avenue South.  It was clean, Spartan, masculine, as if he were a kind of priest or soldier.  Fred’s quarters showed a kind of frugality and simplicity that can evoke an aesthetic, even spiritual, response.  There was a kind of morality about Fred that poked through his sense of humor.  It was not that he subscribed to any grand moral theory or particular political design.  It was more personal and immediate.  Fred wrote me once about an incident in which he witnessed a purse snatching downtown.  Fred immediately set off in pursuit of the thief, ran him down, and sat on him until the authorities could arrest him.  How many of us can ever imagine the wit and ability to do such a thing?  In Fred’s case, I expect he did it for the best of reasons:  because he could.  To this day, one of the things I live with is Fred’s gentle remonstrance, after I disappointed him by rude behavior toward Debby’s boyfriend at a holiday party. Charles had invited us to a gathering of his friends at his parent’s home along Kenwood Parkway.  I thought I was being funny.  I know that Fred was right.

         In later years Fred shared with great pride the accomplishments of his niece and nephew.  I do not know, but I hope they understand how much their uncle cared about them.

         This leads me to the Enigma of Fred.

         When we were still in college, Fred told me that he never expected to marry:  he was so afraid that he would not be up to the task of parenthood.  He never did marry.  In view of everything that Fred taught me, in view of his kindness and love of others, in view of his dedication to his own family, I find myself imagining Fred’s marriage, and his children, who would have played soccer and hockey like my daughters and been their teammates, who would have been better natural athletes than my own.  I imagine that Fred would have coached them all, and that David and Madeline would have had first cousins.  I can see it all.  It is harder than his death, for me to accept that Fred did not have those things.

         So many times, the social experiences I had with Fred were on his terms.  Fred turned me down when I offered to take him canoeing in the Boundary Waters, so I could share some of my skills and my great pleasures.  He told me he reacted badly to insect bites.  More recently I suggested backpacking in the Rockies.  Fred wanted to do some local hiking first.  At the time, it would have been easier for me to schedule a week than an afternoon with Fred.  These proposed adventures seemed ready-made for him.

         We just do not have all the answers.  There was a side of Fred that worried about things.  There was a side of Fred that was very self-determined.  You can probably put the word ‘stubborn’ in front of most nationalities and strike a chord:  “Stubborn German;” “Stubborn Dane.”  But Fred and Debby had dual-heritage in two of the most stubborn traditions:  the Swedish and the Polish.  I cannot say that Fred did not live exactly the right life for Fred, and that he knew it.

         Fred consented to be the best man at my wedding, and he honored Susan and me with a toast, in those famous words of the tin man in the Wizard of Oz, words so sincere, they could be mocked if they were not so true:  In matters of the heart, we are measured not by how much we love, but how much we are loved.  Dear Fred, in this respect you exceed measure, and you shall be sorely missed. 


03/13/18 04:04 PM #3    

Julie Peterson (Freeman)

Thank you for your heartfelt, sometimes humorous, and beautifully detailed tribute to Frederic, Paul.  Julie


03/14/18 04:36 AM #4    

Christine Granbeck (Bart)

What a lovely tribute, Paul. Thank you for sharing so many warm memories of Frederic.


03/15/18 04:08 AM #5    

Laurie Longeway (Reinertsen)

 

 

In repose to Paul’s “short story on Fred at his Eulogy:

 

As I said, I spent 13 years of school enjoying Fred’s company. Although I never knew him as Frederic, he was just Fred to me. In grade school, we lived in the same direction, usually walking home together, pushing each other around as Armatage age kids would do. Bruce Zastrow walked with us occasionally but ruined a bit of the dynamics that Fred and I established. As I noted previously, 5th grade we sat in a square of desks. Fred and I, Jimmy Messebauer and one other were the raucous foursome, if that was even possible at 10. It was one of my most memorable years as we were really in sync then. I lost a little closeness in high school which I regret but consider him one of the most upstanding, kind human beings, at least he was to me.

I was very distraught that he would not be at this reunion. He wasn’t at the last one in which I think he was still with us but he did have a very shy side.

If you are at the 50th, Paul, I would love a few minutes to catch up with you on Fred. Your Eulogy was heartfelt and wonderful and sounded so deserving and exactly what Fred would have appreciated although he wasn’t a self-gratifying person. It was just interesting some of his thinking, ideas and what he actually did.

Time passes so quickly but as always we remember trivial things about our past and as far as I am concerned, I can see Fred and I walking home making juvenile comments to each other until we got home. Such sweet, little simple pleasures that was a main part of my young life. I will remember it with fondness. 

I miss the simplicity of those days with Fred and remember them fondly and with a wry smile at his teasing. He was a truly beautiful person.

Your class buddy Fred, 

 

Laurie Longeway 

 

 

Paul, your Eulogy was exceptional and still so sad we lost him before his time.

 


03/20/18 11:32 AM #6    

Paul Clabo

Laurie, I am on the reunion committee and I will be at the 50th reunion. I would be delighted to talk a bit about Fred. He did like to tease, and if he teased a girl or a woman I think it meant he liked her. I can share a story about that. Paul

 

 


03/21/18 09:50 PM #7    

Laurie Longeway (Reinertsen)

Love to talk to you Paul. Fred also punched me in the shoulder a lot in grade school, I will take that as a sign of affection.


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